With the news that the key bag is to be taken out of the game, and after reading Klep’s post where he is pretty sure that Blizzard has formed a new company division called The Pointless Change Team, I want to give some thought to other changes that the team could put into place. I mean, there must be many areas of the game where changes need to be made for the sake of change, to give the illusion that Something is Being Done! After all, if something is seen to be done then obviously that means that things are being done, and if things are being done then that must also mean that changes are being made, and with changes comes new possibilities so it must all be good. There can be no other explanation. A lot of people have commented that removing a key bag does not equate with removing keys. How right they are! So with that in mind lets look at the possibilities open to the changes that must soon be made for the betterment of all.
Stage One – Class Trainers.
We all know that it’s such a drag having to actually walk, no ride your land mount, no sorry – fly to where the class trainer is in each city. And for what? For them to just wave an imaginary magic wand over you, give you some new abilities and spells, and then take your gold? How stupid is that? So now, with the removal of all class trainers from the game, Blizzard can now introduce the long awaited training system by osmosis. How it works is that when you go up a level you automatically get all the new powers, spells and abilities associated with that level. Gold is removed from your bag to compensate for this. If a player did not have enough gold to pay for all the new abilities then the gold will be deducted from all future gold earnings with a small interest charge compounded at 17.5% per in-game day. We are sure that players will be relieved that the onerous chore of having to actually go and see a class trainer in person has been lifted from their shoulders.
Stage Two – Spells and Levelling.
Since the removal of class trainers in the last patch, and the unmitigated success it has been with no player going to a class trainer since that time, we at Blizzard have decided to take this one step further and give players the streamlined path to success that they have been craving. To that effect we have decided to remove spells and abilities from the levelling process. This way your fresh faced level one toon will have all the spells and abilities ready at hand to face the dangers of the world. Many players have been crying out that it is unfair that level 85 toons have more abilities than they themselves do at level 1. Blizzard does not want to associate itself with unfair discriminatory practices such as this, so you can all rest assured that on creating a level 1 toon you can now do everything that you want. Gold will still be taken out of your bags to pay for these abilities, which will accumulate with a low interest rate of 17.25% over the course of your levelling time. We are excited at this change and cannot wait to the see the positive effect that it will have on the player community.
Stage Three – Spells.
The introduction in the last patch of all abilities at level one has been such a big hit with more level one toons created than ever before, that we have decided to take it one step further. Blizzard is proud to announce the removal of all spells and abilities within the game. From now on players will simply be able to do whatever they want. Players will now find a big red button in the center of their action bar. When this button is pressed then everything targeted by the player will automatically die in horrendous ways. We felt that it was unfair that some players were at a disadvantage to others by having to remember all the different spells and abilities. With this change we can truly say that WoW is a level playing field suitable for everyone to join in and enjoy.
The Noisy Rogue 
June 1, 2011 at 9:59 am
Like it.
I often told myself things like “No, that’s something they will never do”.
And then next year they did it 🙂
June 1, 2011 at 5:54 pm
The interest thing got me thinking about a banking system for WoW. Wouldn’t it be great to take out a gold loan for that shiny mount NOW, and pay it off later?
And if you don’t pay it off, the cyber-repo men take away your shinies.
June 1, 2011 at 6:24 pm
[…] best gamers ever, play the game. Along with great players comes famous people. From Elitist Jerks, Noisy Rogues, Big Bear Butt, Matticus, and Tobold, WoW has had it’s share of people that have become […]
June 2, 2011 at 12:51 pm
It all began with a sequel.
You see, I enjoyed Bioware’s single-player RPG ‘Dragon Age Origins’ immensely. I’d place it right up there among the finest video games ever created. Then came the sequemn, Dragon Age 2.
As most Dragon Age fans will tell you, should you ask, this sequel is a pale shadow in comparison with the original game. Most of the stuff that made ‘Origins’ such a classic were either removed entirely for the sequel, or dumbed down, ‘streamlined’ and re-designed. DA2 was still a good game in many ways, it just wasn’t nearly as good as ‘Origins’.
Now, luckily, this doesn’t matter so much, for one simple, and rather obvious reason.
I can still go back and play Dragon Age Origins whenever I choose.
In short, no matter what Bioware get up to in the future, even if they decide to turn the Dragon Age franchise into a 2D racing game, featuring Hanson riding on the back of giant badgers, I can still re-experience the magic simply by putting that original disk into the disk drive.
But imagine the clamour from fans, and imagine how ghastly it would be if Bioware decided one day that all owners of Dragon Age Origins should undergo a ‘forced upgrade’. Imagine that one day they decided that DA2 is the ‘true Dragon Age’, and that it should be the only one that customers should be allowed to play.
Imagine if, every time I tried to install or play Dragon Age Origins, a forced patch download occured, which caused all installed files to be overwritten with Dragon Age 2 content, leaving us physically unable to play ‘Origins’.
The feedback from fans would probably be easy to predict. Now imagine that Bioware responded with a message, accusing those who prefered the original game of ‘wallowing in nostalgia, and refusing to move forward’.
… For some reason though, Blizzard Activision have seem somehow to have gotten away with exactly this, when it comes to World of Warcraft, and there’s barely a murmur about it.
World of Warcraft Cataclysm by name, even worse by nature.
I now find myself physically unable to play the game I love. The title that I purchased, and enjoyed for over five years is no longer playable. I still pay a subscription for this game. I can still log into something that calls itself ‘World of Warcraft’, but it aint the WoW I know and love. That game is gone – no more….. I can never play it again, save possibly by playing on some kind of private server; a rather dubious option, and in any case illegal under Blizzard’s own terms and conditions.
Since the expansion hit us with it’s not-very-subtle broadside blast, it’s as if the living, breathing world of Azeroth that I spent so many happy hours within, the place I came to know and love has been sank forever beneath a sea of mediocrity and banal accessibility. Not ‘altered’, not ‘revamped’ – sank! kaput! gone!
It now feels as if I’m playing WoWLite, a quick, cheap and cheerful, arcade-style version of Blizzard’s original MMORPG. It’s like there’s an original game was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and then comes along a loud, brash sequel directed by Michael Bay; filled with distracting pyrotechnics and glittery A-listers.. but ultimately lacking any depth or characterisation once you glimpse beneath the shiny surface. Frustratingly, it’s still possible to make out elements of the original game, blinking seductively at me from a mire of dross. It must be addiction those tantalising glimpses that somehow keep me logging in.
I’ve come to hate the term ‘streamlining’ with the type of passion and commitment usually reserved for telemarketing calls. Every time I read about how something in the game has been ‘streamlined’ to ‘improve the flow of [insert content here]…’ it’s like a death knell in my heart.
One of the worst crimes of Cataclysm (and there are many) is the feeling that I am being patronised. The sense that some developer feels (on my behalf) that my Rogue can’t be bothered with all that boring stuff like using reagents for poisons, or levelling lock picking. After all, doing so uses up valuable time, better spent farming heroics in the LFG tool. Besides it’s complicated and confusing. What if I forget to buy reagents for my poisons?
Someone out there feels that if I create a Hunter, I shouldn’t need to go through all the rigmarole of buying ammunition. It serves no practical use, besides adding a layer of role-playing immersion that helps emotionally tie me to my character. Why make me work for my reward at level 10, and feel that fuzzy glow of satisfaction when I finally get my first pet, when it can just be given to me immediately for free as soon as I enter the world? After all, I might not do the quest on my own volition, and then actually enter a dungeon without one.
Look how much time players were wasting by running around from one location to another, attempting to solve the inherent puzzle of quest locations. Better to place objectives within a few hundred yards of each other, to save time and effort, and if that’s not possible – why – we can just teleport them directly to the right place! Saves loads of time, makes it all easier and simpler, more streamlined, less effort involved.
… Oh and don’t befuddle ’em by providing too many choices, we don’t want ’em to get confused. Make it all nice and linear, one quest leads to another, like a nice, easy breadcrumb trail. It’s not like they’ll be doing it for long anyhow; not with the levelling speed increases. Remember, the kids nowadays have short attention thresholds, they’re used to big, flashy, fast-paced action that jumps quickly between scenes in the style of Michael Bay. Don’t let their attention waver!
Little by little, death by a thousand cuts.. removing flavour elements in the name of accessibility and ‘streamlining of content’. Speeding everything up by several orders of magnitude. Everything must be INSTANT, or if not instant then FAST, why put time into achieving something when it’s much simpler to give it to them NOW NOW NOW?
Remember the new credo: FASTER = BETTER, EASIER = MORE FUN, COMPLEXITY = BORING
It seems evident, that at some stage in the game’s latter development, the team involved decided (or had it decided for them by slick Activision marketing executives) that the game’s target audience had changed. This meant that the original development philosophy had to be altered to suit the ‘new target audience’.
No longer would World of Warcraft cater for ‘old school’ MMORPG players, with their ‘virtual, cohesive online world’ standpoint. Instead, a newer, fresh-faced, and younger audience had ‘adopted the game as their own’. These Facebook-savvy kids; raised on fast-paced console action games, and clickety-click Facebook flash games needed a faster-paced, diversionary WoW experience, with instant access to content. Less downtime. More action scenes, with less of the ‘boring dialogue stuff’ in between. A WoW that they can load up nice and quick, and get fast gratification, nice and quick, with minimal effort involved.
After all, these kids have very short attention spans. Make them stand around looking for a quest location, or force them to travel over land for any length of time and they’ll get bored, and off they will go to the next MMO, faster than you can say ‘GOGOGOGO’.
What’s the best way to keep their attention?
Simple – you just shrink everything, chop the game in half, cram it all into a smaller area. We have a name for this new philosophy – ‘concentrated coolness’.
…..GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO…..
In the meantime, I, and others like myself, the boring, old farts who make up the ‘old school MMORPG’ crowd find ourselves with half a game. I’m desperately trying to find a patch of Azeroth that remains unblemished by the ravages of ‘concentrated coolness’ and ‘streamlined content’… searching for a small island of bedrock to call my own, while everything around me is pulled into the Maelstrom.
But the tide is rising.
June 2, 2011 at 5:56 pm
I could see the first one happening eventually, but by then they’d have removed the gold cost anyway.
I’d like it if we could learn the new abilities from other players who have already trained them. Or that would just lead to some idiot spamming zone channel for an hour “lf 87 mage for firewall will tip!” Just like we used to have the guy spend an hour spamming for an Orgrimmar-UC portal rather than taking the zeppelin.
June 3, 2011 at 8:54 am
Hey, Boringoldfart, your comment is better then the blog post!
June 3, 2011 at 7:28 pm
*shrug*
There’s a sweet spot there that maximizes profit for a business, especially an MMO that has to have a critical mass of players. And make no mistake, games are a business, not a charity.
On the other hand, I do think there’s demand for “classic” servers. What’s that EQ2 one? Fippy Darkpaw or something like that? I think WoW would benefit from offering “classic” or “pre-Cat” servers.
Oh, and incidentally, speaking of Hunters, I never did mind ammo, but pets at creation are a fantastic idea. Why did Hunters have to play for ten levels before actually playing like a Hunter? That was just dumb design to start with, and it taught players habits early on that had nothing to do with good Huntering. Players don’t need all the toys on day one, but they do need to know how their choices will play out as soon as possible.
Similarly, Druid tanks don’t have good tanking tools until the late game, and then there’s the whole “leveling-raiding” disparity, where the game style changes pretty significantly, and ingrained habits cause problems. There are pacing problems with when players learn their class and group mechanics, and sometimes, “streamlining” is about teaching how to play the game better, which really is in the best interest of the whole playerbase.
…though incidentally, when we accept that class trainers can wave their hands and we suddenly “Matrix-learn” a new spell, a good chunk of logic and immersion is tossed out in the first place.
June 5, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Well Tesh, none of your counters to the thoughts I expressed are intrinsically wrong. From a standpoint of efficiency and familiarisation you are technically correct in your beliefs about Hunter pets, Druid forms etc. My views are very likely to be minority views, relevant mostly to myself and a few other boring old farts with similar mindsets.
Why do I hate the fact that if I create a new Druid it gets cat form at level 8, rather than level 20, and that a Hunter is given an instant free pet from level 1?
It’s actually very hard to explain, because it’s more of an emotive state of mind than a belief based on any kind of tangible logic. I instinctively feel that the emotional ties to the character I have created are lessened, the relationship between myself and the character is greatly cheapened as a result of being freely given something I previously had to put effort into to gain. In short it makes the game seem shallower, the rewards less meaningful.
I could never adequately put into words exactly what I am getting at with this mindset, but… at the risk of sounding insane… I want my WoW characters to be crap at low levels! I’m powerfully driven by the concept of taking something that is powerless and rudimentary, and investing time and effort to build it up… make it more powerful, watch it grow from nothing. The closest analogy I can think of is that finding the shell of an old 65 Mustang in a ditch somewhere, spending years restoring it, and finally taking that baby out on the road feels infinitely more rewarding than buying a working one at auction, and maybe giving it a new spray job. Dunno if that makes any sense?
Druids are a classic example. I loved levelling my Druid back in the TBC era. The hard slog and effort that came from learning to play 10 levels as a caster, and being crap… then another 10-level slog as a bear, being crap… having to use every trick in the book, and every spell and ability you had to stay on top… then.. .finally BANG! Cat Form at L20, after this crazy grind, that reward was solid diamond platinum. Even then your kitty was a shadow of what it would be by around L40.
Now… it’s just given to you in an hour or so, all part of the new streamlined, concentrated coolness. Just some shape-shifting spell you get after playing for an hour or so.
I’ve rambled long enough, hope that Adam forgives me, as I tend to suffer from verbal diarrhoea once I get started. And Gesh – thanks, but I doubt it. Adam still one of the small handful of sane voices left in the blog circuit.
June 6, 2011 at 3:10 am
Dear not so boring old fart,
No forgiveness necessary; loved your comments.
June 6, 2011 at 5:42 pm
*chuckle
Indeed, there’s nothing wrong with being an old fart. I think this really is more about emotion and the way the game changed (most of us hate it when things change under them, understandably so), as opposed to trouble with how the game is designed in a vacuum.
I think some of the changes are great, but others I don’t like, like the talent tree neutering.
I really do think there’s a market for a classic server. I know I’d probably have at least a Rogue on one.
I do have to mention, though… MMOs change, just by their very nature. It’s not a genre that’s kind to the desire for things to stay the way we like them.